As part of his collusion complaint against the NFL, Kaepernick’s legal team will seek federal subpoenas to speak with Trump, Vice President Pence and other officials, according to Yahoo Sports.

Advertisement

The Trump administration is reportedly a focus of the collusion complaint against the NFL that Kaepernick brought last year. It has also been reported that Trump figures heavily in the collusion complaint by Kaepernick’s former San Francisco 49ers teammate Eric Reid against the NFL, too.

According to legal experts, Kaepernick’s lawyers can bolster their argument by proving Trump influenced NFL owners to not sign the father of the NFL anthem protests. This is known as a “hub-and-spoke” conspiracy in antitrust law where a central party controls several “spokes,” or co-conspirators.

Through his harsh rhetoric on the issue, Trump could be viewed as a hub.

In a related deposition published by The Wall Street Journal, Cowboys owner Jerry Jones said Trump warned him not to challenge the White House’s bullish stance on anthem protests. Trump has made NFL protests a key issue, which boiled over this week when the White House canceled the Eagles’ Super Bowl visit.

“This is a very winning, strong issue for me,” Jones said Trump told him on a phone call of taking on the anthem protests. “Tell everybody, you can’t win this one. This one lifts me.”

After the NFL announced its controversial protest policy that will levy fines for players who do not stand for the anthem, Jones told Sports Illustrated that Trump “certainly initiated some of the thinking, and was a part of the entire picture.”

In order to file for the subpoenas, the attorneys must first get approval as agreed to through the NFL’s collective bargaining agreement, the Los Angeles Times reported.

The lawyers would have to present an argument to the collusion arbitrator overseeing the grievance, detailing why testimony from Trump or anyone else at the White House is important to the grievance.

The arbitrator would have to agree, then subpoenas could be sought.

Lawyers for Trump had argued in a civil defamation case filed against the President in New York that he’s immune from civil litigation while he’s in office, but two different courts have rejected that argument.

Trump’s lawyer in the probe by special counsel Robert Mueller’s office into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, Rudy Giuliani, said last week that he doesn’t believe the President can be subpoenaed to testify in that case, either.